Hey, Roman.

Hey, how's it going?

Good.

Little quiz for you.

Two words, hatch act.

What does that mean to you?

I've caught little bits of this in the news.

And this is some kind of rule or law that means that a person in the executive can't use

like their executive position to be running for office or something like that.

Is that close?

Yeah, that's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

So this has come up because of the Republican National Convention, of course.

And what we've seen already is the use of the White House for the convention.

So the first lady has given a speech there.

And the president is about to give a speech on the south lawn of the White House.

So not only is this unprecedented for a modern president to use the White House in this way,

it raises this idea of, well, aren't there laws about this kind of thing?

So there is this thing called the hatch act.

There are.

But the answer is actually a bit complicated.

So the hatch act is a depression era law that says basically government employees can't participate in politically partisan activities when they're on the job.

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